Barbie Girl
by Eatsscissors
Summary: She didn't get that way overnight.


TITLE: Barbie Girl

AUTHOR: Mari

EMAIL: R

PAIRINGS: Shannon/Philippe (mentioned in 2.06, thisclose to being an OMC)

SPOILERS: Through 2.06-"Abandoned", including the deleted scenes.

AUTHOR'S NOTES/WARNINGS: I'm normally very odd about warnings, but if you're especially sensitive about reading about sexual exploitation, this probably is not the fic for you.

Shannon pawned three pieces of her mother's jewelry so that she could pay her final month's rent before she moved out. Her hands shook as she pushed the gold across the counter and accepted the money that the grandfatherly man behind it counted out to her. It was less than the jewelry was worth, a lot less, and the sad look in the clerk's eyes as he glanced over her did nothing to change that fact. Shannon was well aware of how she must look, poor little rich girl standing there in designer jeans and a sweater that probably cost more than the wrinkled old man on the other side of the glass spent on his groceries in a month, a jewelry box hooked under one arm and a cellular phone clenched tightly in the hand that was not taking the money. She had paced outside of the store for nearly an hour, unable to work up the nerve to call Boone at the same time that she had been unable to bring herself to walk inside. Pathetic cliché shifting her weight from one foot to the other on the dingy tile in front of him, but still not so sad that he could give her a fair price for what she had to offer.

It was like her spine was being removed, and hot lead being poured in to take its place. Shannon stiffened and felt one of her eyebrows arch up of its own accord. "I need to buy a new handbag," she snapped as she took the money from the brooch that her father had given her mother on their first anniversary. "The Amex is maxed out."

Shannon flounced out, though she could still feel the old man's eyes on her back all the way to the door. She wondered if he believed a word that she had just said.

Shannon was able to maintain the attitude all the way back to her apartment, where she picked up the phone so that she could tell the dance company that, no, she was going to have to turn down the internship with regrets, and, yes, she did understand that this was not an opportunity that would be coming her way again. She put the receiver down and then burst into tears a second later. There were still wet tracks on her face when Shannon found the rage that had entered her in the pawn shop again and, lifting one of her ballet slippers and throwing it as hard as she could against the far wall. It left an ugly black mark before it fell back down to the floor and made her neighbor pound once against the wall in shock.

Afterwards, Shannon spent nearly two hours scrubbing the mark off of the wall again. She could not afford to lose her deposit.

On second thought, Shannon kind of wished that she had thrown her phone against the wall after her shoe. It would have made the urge to call Boone and plead for help that much easier to resist.

---

She had been in the Renault house for three weeks when it happened. The elder Renaults came home late from a party, giggling and whispering to one another in low, happy voices. Shannon lay in her bed, listening to them from the hazy place that was halfway between waking and dreaming, and sleepily hoped that they did not wake either one of the kids up. Laurent was going through a phase where every bedtime was a battle.

Two days earlier, while Shannon was getting Sophie ready for her own bedtime, the girl had reached out and tugged softly at Shannon's hair. "It's pretty," she had said.

Shannon's throat had closed up and stayed that way for several seconds before she could speak. "It get it from my mother," she had said finally, and rushed through Sophie's story so quickly that the girl had had to ask her three times to slow down so that she could understand all of the words.

Now, in her bed, Shannon could hear every step of the Renaults as they came up the stairs. When they reached the second story, Dominique continued on to the master bedroom, her steps so unsteady that Shannon expected to hear the thud of a body falling against the wall at any second. Philippe hesitated at the head of the stairs, as if he was watching and admiring his wife, and then turned resolutely towards Shannon's room.

Shannon closed her eyes again and turned over onto her side, feigning sleep. Philippe did not turn on the lights as he nudged the doors open and softly entered the room. Shannon was only aware that he was close when she felt the mattress dip beneath his weight, felt his fingers trail down the length of her arm. The gesture itself was wholly innocent; Shannon knew damned well that the intent behind it was not.

"Mmm?" she said, turning over and then propping herself onto her elbows. Shannon rubbed at her eyes as if she was having trouble bridging the gap between asleep and awake. In truth, she had gone to full alertness the second that she had heard the footsteps turn. "What's going on? Are the kids okay?"

"Everything is fine," Philippe assured her. "I did not mean to wake you." His voice was so sure, so gentle and so kind, that a nun would have had trouble disbelieving him. To give the nun credit, though, Shannon also did not think that Philippe would have spent the previous three weeks looking at her in her habit the way that he had been looking at Shannon in her sweaters.

Philippe's fingers ran down Shannon's wrist to her hand and gripped it tightly. The way that his thumb began to trace circles over the skin of her palm was a pornography in and of itself, and Shannon had to work very hard in order to keep her face neutral. "You are very beautiful, Shannon." His breath smelled of alcohol from even a foot away.

Shannon hesitated for a long moment before, unsure of what else to say, she replied, "I know I am." She was, she was devastatingly beautiful, and she was the spitting image of her mother. That was why she was there.

If there was an odd note in Shannon's voice, then Philippe was in no state to either notice or care. "So very beautiful," he breathed, and then mashed his mouth down onto hers. He tasted of champagne as much as he smelled of it, stale and sour by now. Shannon made a small sound of protest and put her hand against Philippe's chest to push him away before she could remember herself.

Philippe felt the hand and broke away from her immediately, panting and covering her in fumes. Shannon was not sure how much of her face he could even see clearly in the shadows, but he was still staring down at her as if she was the most enrapturing thing that he had ever seen. "You do not have to this if you do not want to, Shannon," he told her, pronouncing her name in a sing-song lilt, as he always did. He combed strands of her hair back from her face. Much like his hand on her arm, it was the intent hidden just beneath the surface that turned an innocent gesture poisonous.

'No,' Shannon thought, 'and I don't have to pack my bags and go live in the streets, either.' She curved her lips into the winning smile that had brought boys flocking to the front door from the very second that she had begun to grow into her legs. "I want to," she said. After three weeks of watching, she had become a passable liar herself. When Philippe kissed her again, she forced her mouth to open for him.

Later, when Philippe was thrusting himself inside of her hard enough to hurt, Shannon imagined that a glossy carapace was growing over her skin, turning hard and strong what had once been soft and weak. Her mother and father had been two of the gentlest people that Shannon had ever known, and they both had worms crawling and out of their eye sockets by now. A plastic girl would survive. Shannon was sure that she could not.

'What do you know,' Shannon thought, letting out a gasp of what Philippe probably thought was ecstasy while he gripped Shannon's hip hard enough to leave a bruise, 'you and I have something else in common, after all, Sabrina. We both can't feel a thing.'

If Philippe noticed that Shannon had not cried out in orgasm by the time that he was finished, then it did not seem to bother him overly much as he slipped from the room.

---

Shannon's resolve not to feel lasted until the next morning, when she wiped the steam from her bathroom mirror and stared at the marks that had been left on her hips, her thighs, her breasts. Philippe had been careful, there were no bruises or love bites positioned anywhere that could not be covered by normal clothing. Shannon pictured herself in a long line of Venuses, each on sashaying through the house as he perfected his art.

She spent the next fifteen minutes huddled over the toilet.

Shannon dressed quickly and ran a comb through her damp hair before she took a seat on the edge of the bed, clenching her cellular phone in one hand and the deposit from her apartment in the other. Her fingers shook with the effort that it took not to flip open the phone dial in that familiar number. Taking several deep breaths, Shannon willed the shiny veneer that she had felt growing over the night before to come back now, with its hollowness and its strength. Her hand still trembling, she leaned over and dropped her phone quickly back into her purse. Shannon did not have time to do anything with her deposit money before there was a soft knock on the door, and then Dominique poked her head inside without first waiting for Shannon to give her permission to enter. Her husband had the same tendency. Shannon could have laughed, if she did not know that it would be a sick, acidic sound.

"Shannon?" Dominique asked her, the soft French lilt tinged with concern. It was almost enough to send Shannon running back to the toilet as she thought of what she had done with this woman's husband the night before. She felt like a hermit crab stranded out on the sand without its shell, soft and vulnerable.

"I'm fine," Shannon said once she realized that she was allowing the silence to drag on for too long. She could not stop herself from working the wad of cash deeper beneath her thigh as she spoke, unable to quite believe that it was safe even here. It was all the money that she had left in the world. Shannon had not received any of the wages that she had earned on her back yet. "I think that I ate some bad cottage cheese or something." When Dominique continued to look worried, Shannon added quickly, "The kids didn't eat any of it."

Shannon's spine was as rigid as if a pole had been forced down it, every line of her body language begging Dominique to go away, yet Dominique still came forward and sat on the edge of the bed. Shannon was beginning to see more and more by the second why Philippe and Dominique were made for one another. Dominique reached out and touched at the loose strands of Shannon's hair, still damp from the shower. "Such a lovely color," Dominique mused. "You should style it more often. It is one of your finest features."

"I have a lot of them," Shannon said curtly, knocking the woman's hand away before she could touch her skin. Dominique drew back, shocked, as Shannon went on, "I'll be downstairs in a minute." It was the last invitation that Shannon was going to give, short of actually bodily throwing Dominique from the room.

Dominique cast Shannon a disapproving look over her shoulder as she exited the room. Didn't matter. She was not the one signing the paychecks, and Shannon knew this even if Dominique yet did not.

Shannon came down the stairs a few minutes later, her hair still rebelliously damp and falling wherever it wanted to, and heard the ringing of the phone. Dominique came to her, holding out the cordless phone in a stiff, unnatural way that was more like clenching a sword. For one wild moment, Shannon was sure that Dominique knew, and thought that she might even have welcomed it if Dominique did accuse her, but no. She was only angry because Shannon had been rude to her upstairs. Dominique stared Shannon up and down as if she was trying to figure out who she was all over again as she gave her the phone.

'If you had any idea at all,' Shannon thought, 'you would probably be more likely to crack me in the face with this thing.' She cradled the phone against her chest rather than raising it to her ear and asked, "Who is it?" The number of people who even knew that Shannon was here was so pitifully small that she would not even need a full hand to list them all, and none of them had tried to contact her over the three weeks since she had dropped her bags in the spare room upstairs. They were embarrassed for her, something that Shannon had done nothing to try to discourage. She had been downright bitchy at her goodbye party, and had discovered that it was a good fit.

Dominique continued to look at Shannon with new eyes as she said, "It's your brother."

This was not her house. She could not hurl things against the wall in a fit of pique as she could have done in her apartment. "Oh," Shannon said, very softly, not thinking that she could have spoken any louder if she had wanted to. It felt as if all of the oxygen had been driven from her lungs with a single mighty blow. Shannon raised the phone to her ear and waited in pointed silence until Dominique left the room.

"Hello?" Shannon said at last. She was relieved to note that her voice sounded shockingly normal.

On other end of the line, Boone exhaled all of the air in his lungs on a long sigh. "Shannon, thank God," he said. That was real worry in his voice, for her. It had been so long since Shannon had heard anything like it that it took her several seconds longer to identify it, and she knew that there was no way that this conversation was going to end well. "Where have you been?"

"I've been working, Boone, what do you think?" Shannon asked. She let out a laugh. If her speaking voice sounded normal, it was only because she was extending all of her energy to keep it that way. Her laugh was hollow and wild. "I'm a working girl."

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Shannon threw all of her hope into that pause, willing Boone to put her pieces together and come to rescue her, as the plastic shell that she was busily constructing around herself was far too thin to do the job of protecting her by itself.

"Are you all right, Shannon?" Boone asked after the pause had gone on long enough to make Shannon wonder if the two of them had been disconnected. "My mother said that you were _here_, or all places, and I couldn't believe that you would pass up New York to go work in some guy's house."

It was a good thing that she was building that shell, Shannon reflected quickly. Otherwise, she was likely to fly into thousands of different pieces, and who knew who would be struck by all of the shrapnel. "Your mother," Shannon repeated incredulously, unable to get her mind to wrap around the words. "Wait, _she_ knows where I am?" Shannon's laugh still sounded hollow and false. She pushed the back of her hand against her mouth for a moment before she could continue. "That's fabulous. I'll bet that one's going on the fucking Christmas card." From the corner of her eye, Shannon saw a small figure dart from the room. Laurent. She had not known that he was there.

There was no way that Boone could escape knowing that there was something wrong now. "What's going on?" he demanded, sounding as if he was going to come straight through the phone if Shannon could not give an answer that satisfied him. "Do you need for me to come and get you?"

As much as Shannon had been secretly hoping for that at the beginning of their conversation, it stopped her cold now. "Don't you dare," she snapped before she went on. "How does Sabrina know where I am, anyway? I sure as hell didn't tell her."

"One of your friends came by the house." Shannon was going to find that person and kill her. "She was worried about you, Shannon. Giving up that internship was like giving up your dream altogether."

Right. Because she could have worked the sixteen hour days that the internship required and hold down a job at the same time. Like there was any possible way that that could have worked. "Oh, do _not_ get that smug tone with me," Shannon said, her voice suddenly savage. "Like it was such a big dream for you to work for Mommy for the rest of your life."

There was a shocked beat, and then Boone said, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Nothing. Nothing. Don't try to reach me here again." Shannon ended the call and then stood for a long moment with her hand pushed tightly over her eyes, as if physical pressure could force back the tears that desperately wanted to fall, and shook so badly that she was on the verge of falling down. Boone would have come for her if she had asked, Shannon knew. Because he loved her. Because he was in love with her.

Shannon did not know if it was a mark for her or against her that she could whore herself out to a complete stranger faster that she could her stepbrother, but it seemed like a line worth drawing.

When Philippe put his hand on Shannon's shoulder, she spun around so quickly that he was nearly brained with the phone for his trouble. Her fingers remained curled around the phone for several long seconds after she realized who it was, and she thought that she might strike him down, anyway. At long last, Shannon set the phone down on one of the couple's tastefully expensive end tables and put her hand against her heart. She hoped that her rueful expression was convincing. "Sorry," Shannon said. "You scared me."

Philippe touched Shannon's shoulder again, then her face, his graze as light and gentle as any lover's caress. It was, Shannon realized with a sick jolt, what he believed that they were. "Certainly not my intent," he said before his expression turned reproving. "I have been sent on a mission to scold you. Swearing in front of the children?"

Laurent. Damn. "Sorry," Shannon muttered, pushing her hair behind her ears. "I didn't realize that he was in the room." She gestured towards the phone. "Some family business got a little heated."

"Families can often be that way," Philippe said. He ran his eyes in a long, leisurely line from Shannon's legs to her breasts to her eyes. In that stare, she knew that she could wear the right clothes and be forgiven for everything. "Be more careful in the future, ma cherie, hmmm? I must look out for my children's best interests."

"Of course, sure," Shannon echoed from a place far away, the best that she could do without bursting into giggles at the ridiculousness of it all.

Philippe smiled at her before he reached out and touched her hair, the hair that she had inherited from her mother, as gently as he had cradled her voice moments before. "Why must you walk around all ragged?" he asked her. "It always causes me pain to see a woman who does not know how beautiful she is, walking around like the saddest thing in all the world."

Shannon raised her hand so that she could place it over Philippe's own and stroke at the delicate skin on the underside of his wrist. It was easy; she didn't feel a thing. Philippe might have noticed that her fingers were trembling slightly. He did not comment. "I'll fix it," Shannon said, and turned to bounce back up the stairs. She could feel Philippe's gaze appraising her ass with every step.

---

It took Dominique six months to catch on to what was happening under her own roof. That would remain a personal record for Shannon, and she wasn't even trying. She sat on her bed, perfectly made, and picked at a loose thread in the comforter as she listened to the fight raging down the hall. Philippe was raising his voice towards a yell, while his wife's shrill intonations cut the air like a siren every time that he paused to take a breath. There like a symphony of dysfunction, Shannon mused sourly.

From the master bedroom, something shattered against the wall as Dominique's voice became so high and choked with sobs that human words could no longer even be pulled from it. Shannon wondered whether it was the jewelry box or one of the antique bottles that Dominique liked to keep her perfume in, and whether or not she had time to get a manicure later that week. They yelling ceased as a pair of feet came storming down the all, and Dominique appeared in Shannon's doorway among a choking cloud of perfume that gave Shannon her answer. Dominique had been crying for so long that she no longer had any mascara left to smear. Her entire face had a wan, bleached-out look.

"How long?" she demanded of Shannon. When Shannon tensed up at the sudden intrusion into her personal space but said nothing, Dominique began to clench and unclench her fists as if she was seriously considering putting them around Shannon's neck and throttling the life out of her. Shannon had always thought of Dominique as a sweet, gentle employer, even when she was annoyed with Shannon or when Shannon was falling into one of her increasingly long and vile moods, but she looked like a wild animal now.

'This is love,' Shannon thought as she watched her and felt more like an anthropologist discovering the inner workings of an ancient, alien culture by the moment. It was more interesting than the damned bedcover, at least.

"Don't you give me that stare," Dominique snapped at her. "How long have you been fucking my husband, you little bitch?"

Oh. That. Shannon had known as soon as the yelling had begun down the hall that this fight was different from their others, this was the Big One that was going to topple their marriage right away and into the sea, but it was nice to get confirmation all the same. "I don't know what you're talking about," Shannon drawled, returning her attention to the bedcover. She put even more effort into making the lie bad than she could have into making it good, and a three year-old would not have been convinced.

Dominique stalked further into the room, trailing her perfume after her like an angry fog. She raised her shaking arm to point towards the bed, through there was not so much as a wrinkle to mark its surface. Shannon had been learning how to take care of nice things. "There?" Dominique asked her. "Did you fuck him there, in the bed that we gave to you?" Her voice cracked on every other word, as if it would only take one more good blow to shatter her completely.

Dominique made it sound as if Shannon had been stalking her husband through the halls and waiting for the perfect opportunity to throw him down across the first available surface. Shannon felt a little bit of that alien thing called pride coming back into her, making her eyes flash, and she sat up straighter. "Only the first time," she said, enunciating each word carefully and spitting them out of her mouth as if they were poison. "After that, it's more a matter of where he hasn't fucked me. The living room, your room-the bed _and_ the floor-on the patio in the backyard. One time he bent me over the kitchen counter, did you know that? And we both had to watch the clock, because you were supposed to be home with the kids at any minute and we couldn't afford to be caught, but at the same time thinking that we might be was what made it hot." Shannon tilted her head to one side so that she could say, in a just-us-girls tone of voice, "When was the last time that he did anything like that to you?"

Dominique slapped Shannon hard enough to make her head snap around and her jaw nearly collide with her shoulder. She hardly even felt it. "You filthy whore," Dominique said with fresh tears standing out in her eyes.

"That's pretty expensive perfume that you're wearing dumped all over you," Shannon sneered. Her cheek was finally beginning to sting. "Token of his affection?"

Dominique drew her arm back to strike Shannon again. Shannon did not flinch, until she heard the voice behind Dominique asking, "Mommy?"

Dominique dropped her hand back down to her side as swiftly as if she was the one who had been struck and whirled, while Shannon used the opportunity to surreptitiously rub at the imprint that Dominique's hand had left against her cheek. The feeling was coming back into her, and it _hurt_. Looking at Sophie only made it worse, so Shannon averted her eyes quickly down to the bedcovers.

"Mommy?" Sophie asked again. There was a high, reedy note in her voice, the first sign of panic. "What's happening?"

"Nothing." Dominique went quickly over to her daughter and pulled her into a hug. Shannon saw Sophie's nose wrinkle for a moment at the smell before the desire for contact won out and she curled closer against her mother. "Everything is going to be fine, don't worry."

"Why is Shannon's face red?" Sophie asked, her words muffled by her mother's midriff.

Shannon whipped her head up quickly, but Dominique still had time to see her looking downward and interpret it as a gesture of shame. "Because she had to be punished," Dominique said, enunciating each word as carefully as Shannon had only moments before. "Because she's very, very bad."

It never ceased to amaze Shannon, how smart kids actually were. Even though Sophie was only ten, the look that she directed towards Shannon was sharp and knowing and steeped in hatred. Shannon knew that look. It seemed as if Sabrina was determined to follow her everywhere.

Shannon returned Sophie's look, desperately ordering herself _not_ to be weak, _not_ to direct her eyes downwards, and willed her shell to come back.

---

Philippe and Dominique had both been married before, and Sophie and Laurent were stepsiblings rather than actual brother and sister. Shannon started slightly when she realized that. She had never bothered to ask, had always just assumed.

Didn't matter, she told herself savagely. That Sophie had left with her mother only meant that there was one fewer squalling child that she had to waste her energy in caring for. If memories of the first meeting between Boone and herself, each one staring at the other from the safe havens created by their respective parents, tried to enter her mind, then she shoved them away with a savagery that surprised even her.

Philippe had family in France still, and he told them all that it would be a good idea for them to get away from the United States for a little while until everything had settled down again. Until Dominique had finished talking to her lawyers and was ready to draw up the divorce papers, was the unspoken subtext. Shannon passed her time by wondering how many au pairs there had been before her, and whether Dominique herself had not been one of them. She was certainly still young enough and pretty enough for it.

Laurent, always a tempestuous child, became even more difficult to deal with than before and was forever asking when he would be able to see his sister again. Shannon and Philippe both pretended that they did not hear him.

"Your wages will of course be unaffected," Philippe said to Shannon one night as they lay together with their limbs still intertwined, the sweat not yet cool across their bodies. It took Shannon several seconds to realize that he meant that her pay would be unaffected by only having to care for one child instead of two. The pathetic part was that he seemed to have convinced himself that this was what he was paying her for altogether. Shannon twitched the covers up higher over her breasts and said nothing. Beside her, Philippe lifted his hand so that he could comb his fingers gently through her hair. He always did love her hair.

Two days later, Shannon went to a salon, had all of it cut off to a point just below her chin, and dared Philippe to say anything. Though he looked at her with large, startled eyes when she walked through the front door all newly shorn, he said not a word. His wife had been the trade-in. Shannon was the shiny new factory model. It would be bad form to start expressing pleasure in his new purchase now.

Once Shannon had several glasses of wine sloshing around inside of her, she thought that this was the funniest thing that she had ever heard.

The house was packed and sold within two weeks, and most of the furniture inside as well. All of Shannon's worldly belongings could fit into three suitcases that sat at the foot of her bed. She still considered getting rid of them, starting over completely new with all new things to fit this stranger that looked and moved like her. She knew that she could get a credit card from Philippe if she promised to get something with spaghetti straps that would fall off of her shoulders just so, and in a rich golden color like her hair had been.

What the hell, Shannon finally decided as she sat down on the third suitcase so that she could get it closed. It was not as if she hadn't already been slowly exchanging the clothes that she had arrived with for presents first accepted reluctantly and then increasingly asked for ever since she had arrived. Everyone underwent that kind of metamorphosis, that kind of mutation, it was just that a quick, symbolic action was more cathartic.

Shannon thought about hauling her own bags down the stairs to the taxi that was waiting to take all of them to the hospital before she dismissed it. Let Philippe or the taxi driver deal with them. It was not as if he did not owe her.

Philippe had rented a house for them just south of Paris, a far more modest affair than the one that they were leaving behind in America. He called it charming. Shannon looked at it and thought, 'He's running out of money.' It was an important thing to keep in mind, now. Shannon struggled from time to time to remember the girl whom she had been a year before, the one who had thought of money only as something that was always there, just for fun, and found that she was trying to find a shadow that always ran away at the first touch of the light.

"No," Shannon said when Philippe reached for her on their first night in France. She pushed his hand away before he could roll on top of her the way that he usually did. "I don't like it like that."

"What?" Philippe asked. He did not sound angry, only surprised, and Shannon could see his eyes gleaming in the darkness. She had never refused him before, in anything.

"I want to try something different," Shannon whispered back, taking his hand and guiding it. When she threw back her head and cried upwards to the ceiling later, it was not feigned. The next morning that panicked Shannon almost as badly as she had been after the first time that Philippe came to her.

Shannon discovered shortly afterwards that she liked French wine, and the fact that she was still underage in the United States did not mean a damned thing here. Philippe bough her whatever she wanted, though he began to look increasingly nervous about it. Laurent stopped asking about Sophie and when he would be able to see her again, realizing that no one was listening to him, and began to watch that damned DVD over and over again until Shannon wanted to scream and throw it against the wall. She generally responded with a glass of wine, one for each viewing, which led to fantastic nights and equally horrible mornings. Philippe's expression grew more dubious by the day.

"Laurent is hungry," Philippe told her one morning as Shannon staggered into the kitchen in search of tea and aspirin, both of them in the largest quantities that her body could handle.

"So feed him," Shannon replied as she filled a kettle with water from the tap. She stared at the stove for a long moment as she debated whether or not she would be able to take it when it began to whistle, before she reluctantly set it down and turned on the burner. Even that quiet click made her wince.

"Isn't that your job?" Philippe asked her testily.

Something about his tone made a tiny part of Shannon, the only remaining piece of her that had not yet learned how to bend and bend without breaking, snap cleanly in two. She whirled around so hard that she nearly lost her balance. "Is it?" Shannon asked him. "Is that what you pay me for? I thought that it was for something different."

Philippe stared at her with his jaw falling open slightly, as if he could not believe what he was hearing. Shannon could have slapped the expression right off of his face. "How do you not understand what this is?" she wanted to seethe at him. "How do you think that I'm anything other than your whore?" It was, very suddenly, all that Shannon could do not to take Philippe by his shoulders and shake him so hard that his head would snap back and forth and his fillings would rattle in his teeth for the stupid, self-serving lies that he managed to tell himself. Shannon had been facing the ugly truth for the better part of a year now. Philippe could manage to look it in the eye for five goddamned minutes.

It was shocking to Shannon, the depths of emotion that she was feeling after so long floating on a muted sea, and the strongest emotion of them all was a low, slow-burning anger. "I let you fuck me because you pay me," she said to him through gritted teeth, wanting to yell and not sure why she wasn't. "And I haven't got a paycheck in three weeks, so you have a lot of nerve trying to lecture me about _either_ of my jobs."

The kettle behind her whistled before Philippe could reply to her. Shannon jumped hard and only barely fought back the urge to clamp her hands over her ears as her head throbbed in time with her heartbeat and threatened to explode altogether. She grabbed the kettle and hurled it into the sink as hard as she could. Water splashed across the kitchen; both of them were lucky not to be scalded. Shannon whirled around and stormed from the kitchen before either one of them could speak.

She was shaking by the time that she reached the bedroom and slid down against the wall, wrapping her arms around the tops of her knees. Once released, she could not now seem to make herself _stop_ feeling, and thought that she was going to be burned alive by the fury before she was able to get it under control again. Her vision was blurring and her hands were shaking so badly that she nearly dropped her cell phone as she pulled it out and hastily dialed a number.

"Hello?" The voice that answered sounded bored and distracted, but it was _familiar_, and Shannon felt the tears that she had thus far been holding back rushing forward to overtake her.

"Boone?" she gulped.

"Shannon?" Boone snapped. In that single word, all of the corporate sloth that had entered his voice was stripped away. "What's wrong? Where are you?"

"I'm in France." Shannon did not intend to tell Boone everything or even anything, but the words spilled out her somehow without her control, and she was only able to keep the most humiliating details to herself. She was well aware of how much that left behind, and how much it was terrible.

There was a long, weighty silence on Boone's end once Shannon finally wound down. He said only, "I'll be there in twenty-four hours," and hung up without another word.

Shannon stared at the phone for several long minutes after Boone was gone, feeling her tears subside and the eerie sense of calm beginning to creep back. When she looked up again, she was unsurprised to see Philippe standing in the bedroom doorway and watching her without saying a word. He was probably afraid to come near her.

"You're not paying me because we don't have any money, aren't you?" Shannon asked him softly.

He shook his head. "Dominique is going to get almost everything," he said, and Shannon knew that she was going to be the most expensive mistake that either of them had ever made. She looked back down to the phone that she was still clenching in her hand.

By the time that Boone arrived, Shannon was plastic again.

End


End file.
